Tremors of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection features.
Thoughts on Apple putting a stop to email tracking pixels and what it means to publishers, creators and advertisers.
On the latest episode of the Pivot podcast, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway discuss why paying for the privilege of privacy could be a major trend going forward.
Kara Swisher: Okay. Scott, what is your prediction today?
Scott Galloway: Look, the whole world is digressing to two business constructs. And it’s either iOS, where you pay a premium and you get more privacy, a more elegant solution, kind of the premium — or it’s going to Android, where you get essentially the product for free, and they figure out a way to monetize you as a user. And by the way, the majority of the world picks Android. Two-thirds of the world — 70-plus percent — says, “I love having a free phone. I love having free platforms. And if they mine my data and use it and there are some externalities, I’ll complain about it. But every day, I vote to go Android.”
Scott further adds: “I think we’re going to see increased market share across the iOS-subscription part of the world, even around vouchers and emails. I think individuals are really coming into touch with, or starting to understand, just how negative some of the externalities are, and the extent that they are as individuals being monetized.”
Scott has also invested in Neeva, which is a subscription search.
Sridhar Ramaswamy the co-founder at Neeva is also a former Google executive. Sridhar who worked at Google from 2003 to 2018 chatted with Kara on the Recode Decode podcast about how it evolved into an advertising powerhouse, why people should care about the "incredibly personal" details revealed by their search history, and why he believes Neeva can reach a larger audience than just wealthy privacy-conscious consumers.
He also chatted with Scott on his podcast about how Neeva — an ad-free, private search engine — is differentiating itself in the search market. Sridhar also shares the leadership lessons he’s learned from running a team of 10,000 people during his fifteen and a half years at Google.
The messaging from iOS is very clear - “You pay a premium to get more privacy and premium solutions.”
After successfully waging a war with Facebook over app tracking, Apple now with its latest iOS15 update has completely put a lid on email tracking with a suite of Mail Privacy Protection features.
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection features
Mail Privacy Protection is not enabled by default, but Apple will highlight it as an option when you upgrade to iOS 15 or iPadOS 15.
If you're running one of these updates, you can turn it on in Settings > Mail. Tap on "Privacy Protection" and then toggle on "Protect Mail Activity." In macOS Monterey, open up Mail, go to the Mail Preferences, and then click on Privacy. From there, toggle on Protect Mail Activity.
When enabled, Mail Privacy Protection hides your IP address and loads all remote content privately in the background, routing it through multiple proxy services and randomly assigning an IP address.
Here's how Apple describes the feature in full:
Emails that you receive may include hidden pixels that allow the email's sender to learn information about you. As soon as you open an email, information about your Mail activity can be collected by the sender without transparency and an ability to control what information is shared. Email senders can learn when and how many times you opened their email, whether you forwarded the email, your Internet Protocol (IP) address, and other data that can be used to build a profile of your behavior and learn your location.
If you choose to turn it on, Mail Privacy Protection helps protect your privacy by preventing email senders, including Apple, from learning information about your Mail activity. When you receive an email in the Mail app, rather than downloading remote content when you open an email, Mail Privacy Protection downloads remote content in the background by default - regardless of how you do or don't engage with the email. Apple does not learn any information about the content.
In addition, all remote content downloaded by Mail is routed through multiple proxy servers, preventing the sender from learning your IP address. Rather than share your IP address, which can allow the email sender to learn your location, Apple's proxy network will randomly assign an IP address that corresponds only to the region your device is in. As a result, email senders will only receive generic information rather than information about your behavior. Apple does not access your IP address.
It's worth noting that senders will see an IP address that corresponds to the region where you're located, giving them generic information about your behavior that is non-specific and cannot be used for building a profile of your behavior.
With the new change, email senders can still monitor your behaviour with tracking links, but the behind the scenes tracking that you might not notice won't happen.
Most of us won’t have a clue about pixel tracking but one thing we as users have started hating is tracking. And that’s why ad companies are being hated the most. But it isn’t so simple.
Apple is also doing for its own pockets.
Will publishers get hurt
Obviously, this is a big blow to advertisers and publishers with email becoming a preferred mode of communication.
Apple detailed the effectiveness of Mail Privacy Protection — and offered a couched warning to publishers.
“If you've been using remote images to measure the impact of your campaigns, there are a few changes to be aware of. Since mail content may be loaded automatically after delivery, the time of mail viewing will no longer be correct. And since that content is loaded without revealing people's IP addresses and without headers, the location and type of device reading the mail aren't revealed. And you'll see your emails as being opened regardless of if the user read it or not,” said Garrett Reid, Apple privacy engineering specialist.
Nathan Barry in a series of tweets called out the new policy of Apple to be hurting creators directly. In one of the tweet, he says:
“Apple directly says on their postmaster page that you should periodically remove inactive subscribers. But the primary way to track engagement is open rates. If Apple sends an open event for every email then they will be preventing creators from knowing who should be removed.”
Email marketers know the penalties of not cleaning the list regularly. But according to Nathan:
“Creators will have to choose between taking extreme list cleaning measures were healthy, engaged subscribers get removed because they aren’t clicking emails. Or they won’t do any list cleaning which will likely lead to spam filtering for both engaged and unengaged subscribers.”
Matt Taylor, a product manager at the Financial Times, calls Apple’s new policy “lazy” and says it hurts small publishers most.
A major publisher will be hurt, sure. They’ll lose a lot of data on which they sold their newsletter sponsorships. They’ll be less able to confidently purge subscribers who haven’t opened their newsletter in months (what if they’re iPhone users?)…
A smaller publisher, a local newspaper, a solo freelancer, a small blog; all will lose data on a significant part of their audience. A likely valuable part of their audience. And it may stifle or slow their growth or opportunities.
Checklist for email marketers
Meanwhile, Litmus and Mandi Moshay in a series of 4 tweets have listed down things one should do:
Size up the potential impact to your program by determining how much of your audience even uses Apple Mail to read your emails. It might not even matter!
Start testing creative to understand what’s most compelling to your audience so you can confidently continue sending emails that drive engagement.
Start tracking click-through rate over delivered (if you aren’t already) to set a new, additional baseline for campaign success moving forward.
Clean up your lead quality, list hygiene, and sender reputation since you may not be able to rely on opens anymore as a sign of a deliverability problem.
Create audience segments and cohorts that rely on open data so you can keep on using them, at least in the near future.
Apple’s move to cut off granular customer data from email senders will affect the email economy. But Casey Newton informs that people doing email-based journalism like him have all that much to worry about from the shift.
Apple’s move may affect reader-supported newsletters even less, publishing industry executives told me today. Writers can triangulate reader engagement by plenty of metrics that are still available to them, including the views their stories get on the web, the overall growth of their mailing list, and — most meaningful of all — the growth of their revenue.
The “Open rate” metric is dead even though Litmus might not agree: “So, while it might not be time to put the open rate to resting yet, it’s a great reminder to include—and perhaps emphasize—other metrics instead such as clicks and conversions in your reporting.”
Even the Open Rate metrics on Substack is flawed. There have been times when I have not opened my email but the metrics counted it. As a free publisher, I get to know Total Open Rates, Total Views, Email Recipients and Click Rate. I also clean my database every three months and I don’t suck upon metrics.
However, that is not the case for others whose business runs on the ad model. This is a big blow for old school ad and publisher business. They will have to identify new metrics such as Clickthrough Rates. Also, email service providers providing real-time personalisation tools are out of the box.
But does more data mean a better serving of the consumer who no more loves to be tracked? I am not talking about consumers who are ready to trade data for free things.
“The advertising industry has addicted itself to tracking, prioritizing bottom of the funnel metrics at the expense of great content and creative. It’s tragic,” said Alex Kantrowitz, author of the free, ad-supported newsletter Big Technology.
Apple’s new move also pushes itself further into the direction of supporting the creator economy that wants to look beyond the ad model of 30%. As Casey says:
“Apple will be there, ready and waiting to take a 30% cut of Twitter Super Follows, paid podcasts, and ticketed Facebook events.”
Meanwhile, Apple is growing its ad business that is dominated by players like Facebook, Google and Amazon. Apple’s privacy changes are going to boost its ad business.